The ability of vaccines to protect the public from disease has made vaccines an integral and vitally important part of today's society. Traditionally, many vaccines are produced directly from samples of a pathogen by either weakening or completely eliminating the ability of the pathogen to cause disease. However, this traditional vaccine production approach is of only limited effectiveness against diseases such as influenza that are caused by pathogens that frequently mutate. Moreover, some pathogens, such as the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), mutate at such a rate that traditional vaccine production approaches are rendered substantially ineffective.
Research in the fields of immunology and biotechnology has attempted to mitigate the problems associated with vaccine design for rapidly mutating pathogens such as HIV by providing a computational approach to vaccine design. Most of the research in computational vaccine design has focused on cocktail approaches, wherein a series of nucleotides or amino acids corresponding to portions of a collection of similar virus strains or other pathogens is synthesized to enable the human immune system to create antibodies for the pathogens represented by the synthesized sequence. However, vaccines created from these cocktail approaches are typically significantly large in size. As a result, vaccines created using cocktail approaches may be difficult to deliver, expensive to produce, and more likely to cause an autoimmune reaction in a recipient.
In view of at least the above, there exists a need in the art for an efficient technique for constructing an effective vaccine while minimizing the required size of the vaccine.